“Hi!” Peter called out.
“Um, hi,” Conrad answered uncertainly, as he and Tusité drew near. “You seem ... cheerful.”
Peter shrugged. “It’s our day.”
Conrad frowned. “Our judgment day, you mean.”
“This is your place,” Tusité told him. “Stand here and be good.”
Her hand left his arm, and she was on her way back up the stairs, with another Tusité trailing behind.
“So what happened to you, anyway?” Conrad asked Peter. “Did you get killed?”
“Me? No.” Peter sounded surprised. “Though I was marooned for six weeks. Pickings got pretty lean; that rainstorm washed out a lot of the plants and stuff. By the time the navy showed up, I’d gotten very skinny. I was tired all the time, not really doing anything. It sucked.”
“I’ll bet!”
“Well, it’s done. The navy people were astonished when they found me there. We were already famous for having departed.”
“We?” It was Conrad’s turn to sound surprised.
“Hey,” Peter said defensively, “I helped a lot with the planning. It was my mission, too.”
“And mine,” said Martin Liss beside him.
“Little gods,” Conrad exclaimed softly. “I tried to save you, Martin. I really did. Twice!”
“Hey, don’t fret. We all knew the hazards; we all took the chance. I’m just happy to have been a part.”
“Me too,” said Jamil Gazzaniga and Raoul Sanchez together.
Bloody hell, what was going on here? Why was everyone so happy? Especially the dead, the betrayed?
“Hey, bloodfuck,” said Ho Ng, clapping Conrad on the shoulder in a distinctly comradely fashion. Steve Grush clapped his other shoulder, and then James and Bertram and Khen and Preston and Emilio and Karl were all crowding around him, smiling, patting, shaking his hand.
“What’s going on?” he demanded. “Half you guys were murdered! By me, by Bascal! Why are you so cheery about it?”
Standing, smiling, the prince slid forward along the edge of a stone bench, parting the boys around him like a drop of soap in oily water. “Conrad, my man! Haven’t you turned on a TV?”
“Um, no. Why?”
“You’re fucking famous!” somebody shouted.
“Conscience of the revolution!” said someone else.
“What?”
Bascal nodded. “It’s true. We space pirates are the particular heroes of the Children’s Revolt. We’re its heart and soul, its inspiration.”
“What revolt? Us? Camp Friendly?”
The prince rolled his eyes. “Did you ask anyone? Did you read a headline? Did you hear anything? There were riots in three cities, boyo. Takeovers and ransoming on a bunch of neutronium barges, plus three other acts of space piracy, including the theft of my mother’s own grappleship. It was a general, systemwide uprising. What were you, in a cave?”
“Um. Well, almost.” They would have brought him a TV or newsplate if he’d asked for one. The king’s letter could probably have told him these things as well. Should it have occurred to him to ask?
“It was all because of us, Conrad. All inspired by us. And with the Palace Guard’s memory dump, you’re the most famous of all! Well, after me. And Xmary too, but she’s a special case, being in two of the crucial places at the same time.” At Conrad’s blank stare he explained, “Because she helped orchestrate the first August riot? With Feck? Oh, never mind, you dolt. Just stand there, all right? Look heroic.”
Conrad blinked. “This is a joke, right?”
But even as he was saying it, he could see Feck and Xmary walking down the steps together, shaking their fists in the air in gleeful defiance. And behind them were other people, other young people who looked vaguely Denverish somehow. The stands were filling up in clumps and clusters, but Feck and Xmary, with Tusité leading them, came right down to the row behind the last of the space pirates.
“Conrad!” Feck said happily.
“Hi, Feck. So you started a riot, did you?” The only answer was a grin so wide it must have been painful.
And then Xmary was there, waving her fists. But her grin was not so wide or self-assured, and it collapsed entirely when she looked into Conrad’s face. She stopped in front of him. “Hello, you.”
“Hi. Do you, um, remember ... I mean, which Xmary are you? Both?”
“Both,” she confirmed, then patted him on the cheek. “Yes, I remember you, you darling fool. How could I forget?”
Bascal stepped forward, taking one of Xmary’s hands and kissing it. At her arrival, his own smiles had collapsed as well. “Xiomara,” he said. “Hello. So very good to see you.”
And then, with a kind of sour look on his face, he took her hand and transferred it solemnly into Conrad’s grasp.
“Huh? What?” Conrad said, brilliantly.
The prince huffed. “I have eyes, don’t I? And ears, and the sense to know when it’s time.” To Xmary he said, “You’re right; we’re not a romantic match. And since I’m the Prince of Fucking Sol, you’ll be easy enough to replace.”
“What a rotten thing to say,” Conrad noted with sudden, rising irritation.
“Shut up,” Bascal snapped. “I’m doing you a favor. Treat her right and maybe we’ll still be friends.” And then he melted back into the stands, taking refuge behind Ho and Steve and the others.
Conrad looked at the hand he’d been given, and then at the young woman attached to it. Behind her, Feck was looking on with a sour, wounded expression of his own. Xmary the heartbreaker? Leaving a trail of bodies and shattered dreams in her wake? He could see it in his mind’s eye: a Xiomara Li Weng who’d stayed home with her parents on that fateful night, waiting for a secret copy of herself that never came home. Did she suspect she’d met the prince? Been arrested? Smuggled herself to an all-boys summer camp, and then escaped? Who could possibly suspect a thing like that?
But then she’d somehow encountered this Yinebeb Fecre, this runaway who knew people in high places. Who knew missing people—revolutionaries on a mysterious voyage. How exciting! How intriguing and suggestive! He tried to imagine what that Xmary would be like, how she might react. That experience was so wildly different than the events aboard Viridity—less dirty and smelly and crowded, less frightening. A truly romantic adventure, to balance out the deprivations and indignities of space.
But did he know her well enough to speculate like this? Would his guesses be wildly inaccurate? He was pretty sure the Conrad Mursk on board Viridity bore little resemblance to the one that had left Cork County three months before. It was hard to be yourself, in conditions like that. Or perhaps the very notion of “self” was a contextual thing—a collection of learned responses to a particular environment. He found the idea oddly cheering: the human spirit shining through adversity.
“I’ll bet reintegration was a shock,” he said to her.
A flicker of smile came and went. “That’s the most intelligent thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
He glanced over his shoulder at the stands behind them. “So, uh ... you and Feck?”
She sniffed. “In a manner of speaking, yes. But I believe he had his share of ... contacts in the underground.”
Indeed, the boy was mobbed by female admirers up there, and seemed to know them all. Was that really Feck? Had he and Xmary really ...
“Oh.”
She scratched her neck. “Look, Conrad, it was—” “Exciting?” he offered sullenly. “Romantic?”